RENO – A few weeks ago, a few Damonte Ranch High School students chuckled as Rotary Club of Reno Centennial Sunset member David Zybert gave them fake money as fake employees and then took it away as taxes, rent, utilities and other typical expenses began to dwindle away their “hard-earned” cash.

While students might not have to mull over budgeting as most adults do these days, it’s the message of deciding responsibly that Zybert was seeking to get across in an informative and fun way.

“Through all these activities, (students) do stay engaged,” he said.

Along with his fellow Rotarians in Reno and Sparks, Zybert are encouraging teens to make responsible decisions in a program called Choices, a presentation that takes two class periods to teach kids how they can achieve their goals, foster good relationships and create better lives for themselves by choosing the right course for themselves.

Members of an individual Rotary club make presentations to the high school it sponsors. They speak to students on a variety of different topics most relevant to them from academics to relationships in an effort to help students get on the right track about making positive choices in their lives.

Zybert said he recently made an impact on a senior that he wouldn’t have known about if she hadn’t approached him.

“She fell into a bad crowd and had a boyfriend who was a dropout,” Zybert said. “Her parents were both college-educated and very successful and they were obviously not happy about it. But nobody could tell her anything.”

He described how she dropped out of school for a year and seemed to hit a dead end in her life but made a sudden U-turn and is working harder than she ever did.

“She is doing all of her senior classes during the day and during the night, she’s doing all of her junior classes as well,” Zybert said. “And she’s going to graduate with her class. … She got what I was saying all the way down to the line. She’s made a whole lot of bad choices. … I consider it a personal triumph with having someone walk up to me and say, ‘I was just there and everything you were saying is true.’ ”

Zybert’s own desire to help today’s teens stems from his experiences with his own children and what he came to call the “irreversible and stupid rule.” Zybert moved to northern Nevada in 1990 and only got to see his children for two weeks out of the year while they stayed with their mom most of the time in southern California.

“One year, when my kids – my daughter who was not quite a teenager and my son who was a teenager – were with me, I was thinking there should be something to tell them, to take home with them, to inspire them because I only got to see them two weeks out of the year,” Zybert said. “I called it the ‘irreversible and stupid rule.’ I told them, ‘You’re going to be faced with all kinds of decisions you’re going to have to make.

“I said, ‘What you have to ask yourself when you’re faced with things is A: Is this irreversible? or B: Is this stupid? If you don’t know, don’t do it because if you find out later it was irreversible and stupid, you’re going to regret it and if you find out later it wasn’t, you can go out and do it.’ ”

Zybert said the Choices program echoes his own lesson to his children, which he meant to motivate them and used as an incentive to help them as long as they were trying their best in life.

“I was impressed by the presentation and all these activities and it was very rapidfire,” he said.

The Rotarians also are responsible for training their fellow members, who serve as assistants, if they show an interest in serving their schools, so at Damonte Ranch, Zybert was teaching as Rafael Cappucci, president and CEO of technology company visionASP, Inc. in Carson City, was learning the ropes of the presentation.

“I want to give them a glimpse that making the right choice may seem hard now, but it will make life easier in their later years,” he said. “On the other hand, not making the right choices could lead to a life of hardship and struggle.”

Cappucci has three daughters: one who graduated from Damonte Ranch from last year, another dwho is attending this year and a third who will enroll in two years, so he has close ties to the school. He will try his hand with students on Wednesday and Thursday and looks forward to helping make a difference their lives.

“I chose to participate in the Choices program because I believe that the freshman year of high school really sets the stage for the future and will impact these young adults for the rest of their life,” Cappucci said an e-mail to the Tribune. “The Choices program helps them to realize that the only thing they have control over is the choices they make as an individual. Each choice has a benefit or a consequence.”

Zybert said the Sparks Centennial Sunrise Club will be participating in the program at Shaw Middle School in the future. The goal is to get all the local Rotary clubs involved, as well as the high schools.

“You know, you see the faces of the kids and some are skeptical and some are interested and you see the whole range of interest,” Zybert said. “I started telling the kids, ‘It can be like a time bomb. You may not even think about it at the moment. It may not mean anything to you, it may not be now, but something will happen to you and you’ll go, oh, that’s what that guy was talking about.’ ”